w. His
evident coldness, on the day following, to the friend who had trusted
him, disconcerted and repelled the other. Hugh could remember a mute
and appealing look that he gave him; but though he felt that he was
acting ungenerously and even basely, he could only meet it with a blank
and repellent gaze, and the friendship had been broken off, never to be
renewed. He had made, too, friends with women both of his own age and
older; but the moment that the friendship seemed cemented, the emotion
on Hugh's part cooled into a _camaraderie_ which was both misunderstood
and blamed. Why go so far if you did not mean to go further? appeared
to be the unuttered question which met him; to which his own
temperament seemed always to reply, why shake our easy and comfortable
friendship by distracting and bewildering emotions? It was, Hugh grew
to discern, a real blot in his character; it was a prudence, a caution
in emotional things, a terror, no doubt, in a sensitive spirit, of
giving pledges, of making vows, of surrendering the will and the
spirit. It did not indeed bring him unhappiness--that was the saddest
part of it; but it left him involved in a kind of selfish isolation.
His soul, he felt, was like a smiling island, which with its green
glades and soft turf invites the wayfarer to set foot therein, with a
smiling welcome from the spirit of the place. But the wood once
penetrated, then at the back of the paradise ran a cliff-front of
sad-coloured crags, preventing further ingress. If indeed the shrine
of the island had stood guarded within a temple which, in its deep
columned and shadowed recesses, had shielded a holy presence, it would
have been different; but the land beyond was bare and desolate. That
was, Hugh thought, the solution. The bright foreshore, the waving
trees, the shelter and fountains, seemed to promise a place of delicate
delights; and there were some of those who landed there, who, on seeing
the pale cliff behind, believed, with a deep curiosity, that some very
sacred and beautiful thing must there be enshrined. But it was the
emptiness of the further land, Hugh thought, that made it imperative to
guard the mystery. In that bare land indeed he himself seemed to pace,
bitterly pondering; he would even kneel on the bare rocks, and hold out
his hands in intense entreaty to the God who had made him, and who
withdrew Himself so relentlessly within the blank sky, that a blessing
might tall upon the sto